Teenaged Parents Charged, More Dispatchers Being Trained, Is Exercise Bad?

Two high school seniors in Alliance face criminal charges in the death of their newborn son. Police say the baby boy was born at the 17-year-old mom's home on July 8. The 17-year-old boyfriend was not there, but the teenage couple was texting back and forth. The mom gave birth by herself in her bedroom at 12:16 p.m. Her parents didn't realize what was happening until around 1:45 p.m., when the teen got up to get help and passed out on the floor. They came upstairs after hearing her fall. EMS was then immediately called to the home. The baby boy died because of lack of care, not violence, on July 8.

Cleveland will start training new dispatchers this week for its short-staffed 911 center. Five more EMS dispatchers are being hired for a unit that is so understaffed that dispatchers are often forced to work overtime to cover shifts. For the first half of 2012, dispatchers logged more than 6,000 hours just in overtime. There are 22 EMS employees in the communications center, which means that those employees have worked an average of 35 extra days so far this year. The city has been trying to merge firefighters into its ambulance service, that effort has been tied up in legal battles.

It's the news that couch potatoes have been waiting for: A new study has found that in about 10 percent of people who exercise, at least one standard measure of heart health (levels of insulin, HDL cholesterol and triglycerides, as well as blood pressure) got worse. And in 7 percent who exercise, at least two of those measures got worse. That's right -- exercise is actually bad for them. But don't hang up your sneakers just yet. Dr. William Kraus, a cardiologist who is the paper's co-author and a member of the committee behind the government's national exercise recommendation that Americans get 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week, points out that an equal number of people in the six exercises studies the researchers reviewed got better - much better. In fact, "10 percent of people were super-responders, and did way better than predicted," says Kraus, who is also a professor of medicine at Duke University. So the take-home message of the study isn't that exercise is dangerous to your health. "If people use this as an excuse [not to exercise], they're just looking for excuses," says Kraus. And that's a very bad idea for most of us. Read the full study here.@